Hewitt on progress in Iraq

from Hugh Hewitt (8:15PM, Jun 27) in reference to this article:

Professor Ignatieff announces in his piece that "the United States did one thing well in Iraq, and nobody else could have done it --overthrew a dictator. Everything else was badly done, and some of what was done (Abu Ghraib) was a moral disgrace and a strategic catastrophe."

The professor concludes many other silly things, and in overwritten prose that wouldn't make a high school editorial, but this paragraph should haunt him for the rest of his no doubt distinguished career. "One thing well?" "Everything else was badly done" --everthing else? How about the unearthing of those mass graves? How about the cessation of a state-sponsored killing spree that National Geographic estimates at having snuffed out the lives of 5 million Iraqis, minimum, over 20 years? How about the return of worship rights to the Shias, or the surgeries for those whose hands were severed by Saddam's secret police? How about the disarming of Libya of its WMDs, or the busting up of the A.Q. Khan network? Was it a bad thing to end Saddam's oil-for-food-for-bribes scam? To rebuild thousands of schools? To dismantle the secret police? One good thing? Everything else badly done? With a new government arriving, and Zarqawi running as opposed to sunning himself? With Abu Nidal dead and the pay-offs to the suicide bombers in Jerusalem halted?
...
But moral incoherence on this level is beyond foolishness, and signals that a part of the elite has simply lost all ability to judge good and evil. In this respect it is like the Vietnam conflict, when the Ignatieffs of that era were proclaiming Pol Pot an agrarian reformer, and the North Vietnamese liberators. That era's foolishness wasn't harmless. It cost millions of lives. Every one of which deserved saving. The Ignatieffs of thirty years ago never owned up to their compliciity in the deaths of millions. This time around, we shouldn't allow tweedy indifference to the suffering of peoples far away to go unchallenged.